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I believe it was Melania Trump who wrote, “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York.” No? Oh, well then maybe it was William Shakespeare or Francis Bacon or Queen Elizabeth–intellectual property rights are often disputed.

Shakespeare, of course, got it right. We only need to shift the seasons some. I’m confident that if he were alive today (he’d be really old) he’d write, “Now is the Summer of our discontent made inglorious Fall by this son and daughter of New York.” They’ve united the country in shared disgust for politics. More than any other comment–both from my liberal and conservative friends–I hear, “This is the choice, the best our nation can produce?”

It feels like this election has been going on since pre-historic times, that the first Pithecanthropus Erectus stumbled from his cave mumbling “Not Hillary” while his wife responded “Never Trump.” We’re tired. We’re unhappy–even unto despairing, but we are not bored. This is reality TV. This is, in truth, the sick spawn of reality TV–filled with insults and people shouting things that in the good old days, we only whispered. This has candidates, not using surrogates to spread dirt but the candidates themselves shouting insults and imprecations. This is politics as a reality TV show about a train wreck. We are not content, but we are entertained.

Both major party candidates have many more passionate enemies than ardent supporters—though, incredibly to me, Trump has more passion on his side. Quite naturally, when one knows of ones own unpopularity, the obvious thing is to attack the opponent. If I can’t expand my base support by making the persuadables like me, I’ll work assiduously to make them hate you.

Both Republicans and Democrats not only demonize their opponents but call for putting them away. Republicans chant of Hillary “lock her up.” They want her in jail. Democrats want Donald in a mental asylum. Hillary is a crook and Donald is nuts.

This is what we’ve come to. From the goodness of George Washington, who turned down a kingship and stopped voluntarily at two terms, to the genius of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, we’ve come to our very own Addams Family, with Donald as the scheming Gomez and Hillary as, well, you guessed it, Morticia.

These two deeply flawed candidates have created a level of toxicity unknown in modern times. Yes, politics “ain’t beanbag,” but with social media and cable, the negativity penetrates the body politic and does actual harm. Negative campaigns are said to depress the vote and the voters. (I know I’m depressed.) People in the middle stay home and feel that it’s not worthwhile to bestir themselves to vote. This is an understandable reaction but totally wrong.

Whether you’re a principled movement conservative who can’t stand Trump, because he’s not a real conservative, or a movement liberal who loves Bernie but barely tolerates Hillary, you need to vote. Both sides are correct that this is a consequential election. Presidencies last only a few years but their legacies are generational in many ways, but none more important than the Supreme Court and the Federal Bench.

Our discontent is not simply with the candidates or even with political corruption and cynicism. Though self-serving hypocritical politicians do turn our stomachs. We’re unhappy and fearful because we feel vulnerable, and most of us know that no one man or woman on any white horse in the White House can truly protect us.

We perceive, incorrectly if we’re white, that we are more vulnerable to violence than ever before. We’re not. Murder is down. Murder of police is way down. The death rate on our highways, even if obscene, is down in terms of deaths per mile travelled. Yes, death by guns is up, but, as a society, we’re unwilling to do anything about it.

Societally we’re taught to fear the stranger, the person from a different country or a different religion. Our fears are way out of line with reality. Large-scale shootings get headlines and Cable’s obsession, but they are a tiny part of all gun deaths nationally. Our greatest exposures to unnatural death are:

Car accidents

Suicide by gun

Murder by known acquaintance.

Murder as a byproduct of a crime (including gangs)

Drug overdose (Prescribed)

Drug overdose (Street)

Drug suicide.

Since 911 a little under one million of us have died from cars and guns, while fewer than three hundred of us from terror on our soil, and I’m including Orlando as a terror event.

Yes, we should worry about bad guys getting weapons of mass destruction. It is true that there are people who want to hurt us and kill us. It is true that our world is not safe. But actuarially we are far safer than we feel.

Recently it feels like we are besieged. Seemingly once a week there’s a mass shooting. Cable brings us to Orlando, then to the assassination of policemen in Baton Rouge and Dallas. In only a couple of days, we’re brought to the truck terrorist in Nice France and right now to Munich Germany. Munich was originally covered as presumably an act of ISIS, but then it seemed to be from neo-Nazi xenophobes. At this time it may have been some form of Islamic terror from an Iranian/German. Or it could be the new and more destructive version of suicide by cop, where a mentally unbalanced person with no meaning in life seeks meaning in death and destruction. This is Lazlo Toth attacking the Pieta with an ice pick trying to destroy because he couldn’t create. These people and events are rare, however, they feel constant and intrusive because they dominate the news.

As, I believe Melania Trump wrote, these are the “best of times and the worst of times.” We feel racial tensions, but for all our faults and prejudices, race relations in America have never been better. We feel for the poor and oppressed, but even world wide, poverty is at an all time low. Yes, unacceptable but not growing. We rightly worry about pollution, but the air in LA is hugely better than when I was growing up and there are 500% more cars than then. We feel that politics is meaner than ever before, but we forget that surrogates for the previously mentioned Saint Thomas Jefferson accused John Adams of being a hermaphrodite and non Saint Nixon smeared Voorhees and Douglas shamelessly with red mud.

I take the horrors in France personally. Having spent two sabbaticals in the south of France and two years in Tunisia, I feel a particular affection for both countries. I am horrified at the pain in France from all the terrorism done in the name of Islam. And, having loved Tunisia and Tunisians, I also feel deep pain and embarrassment for how so much has gone so horribly wrong for so many Tunisians–both at home and in France.

My heart aches for the People of France. So many lives lost. So much horrible cruelty. And simply no reason for it, no excuses possible. This was pure terror–an act of wanton destruction designed to make civilians suffer, be frightened and die. This horror, coming on France’s holiest secular holiday, Bastille Day, multiplies the emotional damage. And make no mistake, terror is about emotional damage–that is the product. The blood is just a means to that end.

The killer, the terrorist, the Islamist extremist terrorist acted in the name of Islam, and certainly believed he was doing God’s work. He deserves to be listed as a Jihadist–as does the monster in Orlando, as do the monsters who so savagely murdered the people at Charlie Hebdo and at Club Bataclan.

But then we get into a philosophical argument. Are they real Muslims? We’re pretty sure that KKK people are not real Christians. We’re secure that they fail to grasp the heart of mercy and forgiveness in Christianity. We can also argue that the extremists who murder in the name of Allah and Islam also are not genuine, having missed the core principle of Islam as expressed in the most repeated phrase in all of Islam, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” From this we should legitimately infer mercy and compassion to be central values.

How then do these acts of inhuman terror keep happening, and what are the responsibilities of the moderate Muslims both to own the terrible perversion of their faith and to distance themselves from the monsters in their family?

While there are certainly violence provoking popular Imams calling for the slaughter of all who do not share their perverse brand of Islam, it is significant that so many attracted to their violent apocalyptic vision are not particularly religious and seldom practice even the rudimentary forms of the faith they choose to proclaim with their words and defame by their actions.

Many come from lives of petty crime and have long criminal records. They seem to be disproportionately people who fail at life, who can’t get or keep jobs or build healthy families. They often seem to be desperate failures who seek meaning in death because they can’t find or create meaning in their lives.

The perpetrator in Nice was not particularly religious. He didn’t go to Mosque. He drank. He was a violent, but seemingly secular criminal. Then he lost his job and his marriage. As a Muslim, even a casual one, he would have known that suicide was out. It is the unforgivable sin, the sin that condemns the suicide to eternal damnation.

Tragically, there is an out, an exception. If instead of killing yourself directly, you join the Jihad and die while trying to kill your enemy, you have a get out of hell free card.

Suicide by cop is a growing and dangerous phenomenon here as well. The Dallas killer, Micah Johnson, had no religious cover-story for his savagery. His rationale came from the radical New Black Panthers. Was he truly dedicated to the plight of Black folks or was he trying to be the big man in death he could never be in life? I don’t know, nor can I know.

However, the seeking of meaning in death and destruction is not new. It is a false form of heroism and whether secular patriotism or religious martyrdom is often the last refuge of scoundrels and psychopaths.

Tragically, whether the killers, the terrorists are sincerely religious or merely delusional makes no difference to the victims nor to our larger society. The destruction they create in the name of religion adheres to that religion. This makes it vital for religious leaders, today particularly in Islam, but also of other faiths, to distance their faiths from violence and to teach that “holy war” is an oxymoron. Wars may be inevitable but when we make killing seem holy, we pervert the nearly universal messages of love.

I am struck by a portion of the Talmud when as the Red Sea closes and drowns the Egyptians pursuing Moses and the Hebrews the Angels celebrate. God rebukes the Angels, telling them they dare not rejoice in the deaths of any of God’s children. We need our ministers, priests, rabbis and imams to make this teaching central.

Memory is at the ever-living, yet now un-beating, heart of Elie Wiesel. Having endured unspeakable horrors, he sought to speak them, to capture just a portion of them in words so that the horrors would not be forgotten.

He sought to find a modicum of meaning in the Holocaust. No, the meaning could not be intrinsic. The Shoah was not G-d’s plan to accomplish a greater purpose. That, he believed, would be a monstrous theology, describing a monstrous G-d. He believed, as did Viktor Frankl, his fellow philosopher and death camp survivor, that any meaning was existential, that it is created by human beings.

After the war, Wiesel was silent; the horrors were still too fresh and raw to be put into words. He eventually came to believe that silence, though perhaps a tempting way of avoiding reliving the agony was both selfish and wrong. The world needed to know; it needed to know the whole truth of what so-called civilized human beings did to each other.

The world needed the truth, but this truth would not set us free. On the contrary, the truth would entail an obligation, a holy obligation to be witnesses to the world, to be dark lights unto the nations, so that when humanity was again tempted by hate, fear and rage to slaughter men, women and children, the testimony of the witnesses might help cool our blood.

Elie Wiesel came to believe that the “greatest sin is silence,” and we must all speak against hate wherever it is and at whomever it is directed. The famous phrase Never Again was not restricted only to Jews. Wiesel acted as a prophetic witness in defense of Muslims in Bosnia and Christians in Rwanda.

Having seen the world turn so violently against Jews, for no other reason than being Jews, he knew how tenuous life could be in the Jewish Diaspora. He knew that Jews had been locked into ghettoes and herded, like animals, into work camps. He knew that anti-Semitic riots turned into pogroms and pogroms into death camps.

He knew that from sophisticated and cultured Germany, France and Austria, to rural Poland and the Ukraine the madness of anti-Semitism could spread anywhere and to anyone. If the Dreyfus Case, at the turn of 19th Century France, convinced many European Jews that a homeland was necessary the Holocaust convinced Wiesel that Jews everywhere need a lifeboat, a refuge, a home.

He was an ardent Zionist and supported Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation. He defended Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks and terrorism. This naturally made him unpopular in some circles, and some charged him with hypocrisy. He believed, however, that the struggle was not with a religion or a people. He believed that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with Islam or Palestinians.

The struggles in the Middle East, he held, were not truly racial or religious, but political. This is no less tragic for all who suffer, die or grieve on all sides. However, our difference could be remediated with understanding, and understanding both begins and continues with seeing and feeling deeply the humanity of others.

I met him only once and heard him in person twice, but one thing he said is engraved in my memory. He said, “I don’t understand hating and fearing the ‘other,’ the different. When I see someone who seems different, I’m drawn to go over and sit down and listen and try to understand him. I want to be nourished, not frightened, by our differences.”

Elie Wiesel, Noble Peace Prize winner, came from a dark and cruel world. He emerged from the death camps believing that he and the Jewish people had been “abandoned by G-d and betrayed by man.” To come out of this despair, he had to abandon his own silence and with words, both passionate and poetic, tried to give meaning to suffering, meaning that only lives if we also live to end violence, hatred and suffering for all peoples of every race, religion and tribe.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote of the Thane of Cawdor’s death that “Nothing in his life became him as his leaving it.” So too with the political career of now resigned British Prime Minister David Cameron. He made a reckless wager that, if given the opportunity to leave the European Union, the good Brits would decline. He bet not just the house but all of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. He thought that he could silence the Eurosceptics for a generation by giving them a vote. This had worked, after all, with the Scottish Referendum on independence.

He might have won if only the young people had bothered to vote. But as with so many Bernie supporters here, they were happy to show up for events but did not bestir themselves actually to vote. Still, he might have won if only Angela Merkel of Germany had not opened the floodgates and let in over a million refugees from Syria and Afghanistan. English workers were already angry at legal immigration from both the EU and the world (Only about 300,000 per year. Half from Europe and half from non-European sources).

But now add to this the fear of being over-run by refugees because the EU was trying to give each member nation a quota of how many they had to take. This was just too much. Right wing folks felt xenophobic and resented the loss of sovereignty, while laboring men and women hated the idea of supporting strangers while so many native English were unemployed or underemployed.

Yes, some were upset by the “faceless bureaucrats in Brussels” and seemingly senseless and endless regulations. Having accomplished big things in the beginning, the self-perpetuating bureaucracy had to justify itself by both growing and making work. Often their work was to annoy a grocer by insisting that bananas must have a certain curve, while cucumbers could not. No, I’m not making this up.

So when he lost, he did the honorable thing and announced his resignation. He came to Parliament and endured hours of questions, some quite withering, with grace, dignity and some generosity of spirit. Less honorably, he refused personally to pay for his bad bet by invoking Article 50, as he had promised during the run up to the vote. He left that piece of dirty work to his successor.

What a mess this Brexit is! No, there’s no question mark; it’s an obvious assertion and one of the few things that everyone can agree upon. There may be slight comfort to us Americans that our British cousins can be as politically dysfunctional as we. However, we still have the ability to take their impulsive, xenophobic folly and, uh, Trump them.

Today’s theme is that no one seems to know much of anything–not about the voting, not about what to do if Brexit passed, not even what the process might be going forward from a “yes” vote.

Last week I explained to my classes that no one knew what the vote in Great Britain would be. I was very certain however that their polling data were no good. People, all over the world, are lying to pollsters. Not simply refusing to answer but not telling the truth. Some of this is being sick of being polled. Some is due to the increasingly popular and cynical practice of push-polling, where so-called pollsters are actually manipulating the public with leading and often misleading questions. “What would you think if I told you that candidate X barbecued infants for fun?” I hang up at the first hint of a commercial disguised as a poll.

Still, the indications were that Britain would remain. So while it might not be shocking that the polls were wrong, it is shocking that the exit polls were also wrong. Early exit polls showed the Brexit failing. People lied about their vote even after voting. It seems that some issues and candidates cause embarrassment, and while we might back them in the privacy of the voting booth, we’re ashamed to admit it in public.

So England woke up after the vote without a plan. Since no one thought it would pass, no one knew what to do–neither the winners nor the losers. They forgot “Stiff upper lip. Carry on,” and panicked. The stock market crashed. The Pound Sterling tanked. The voters and non-voters complained. Many wanted a do over, saying, “Well, if I had known the damn thing might pass, I would have voted.” This is not how democracy works. My accidental Pat Buchanan voting relatives in Florida also would have liked a second chance.

The truth is that it remains the case that no one knows what’s going to happen. The new Prime Minister might invoke Article 50 or put it off. Scotland might stall the whole thing in litigation. A new unity government might even agree to share power and run away from Brexit. Or, in the two years from the invocation of Article 50, Britain might negotiate their “conscious uncoupling” with enough grandfathered agreements, exceptions and cutouts so as not to make a critical difference.

I have to announce that my Ice House gig has been postponed. I will not be appearing on June 23 at 8 pm. I will be re-scheduled at a later date.

This is due, I’m sure, to my going full Diva (Divo?) and requesting, no, demanding that they paint the “Greenroom” pink and make sure that only blue M & Ms were in my dressing room. I’m confident that as soon as the new pint dries and they sort the M & Ms, a new date will be announced.www.Dobrer.com

After doing an hour long show at Pasadena’s Ice House in April, “The JewJitzu of Jewish Humor,” I’m returning with new stand up routine is called “Stand Up Sex.” Doing Stand Up after a three-decade hiatus (a Hollywood word for break, not to be confused with “hiatal,” as in hernia) offers some challenges, not the least of which is actually standing up. Now, I schlep a stylish Danish Modern stool to perch on. There are also the conventions of modern stand up—and I don’t mean conventions in, well, the conventional sense. This is not like Shriners in New Orleans. I mean the new customs and traditions.

I violate most of the conventions. Probably the most important is being young. I used to qualify but something happened with that. The next is to bound on stage with manic energy and shout at the audience asking if they’re ready to have fun? This seems to me the very model of a rhetorical question. I mean, they left home, maybe got a baby sitter, bought tickets and are buying the requisite number of drinks. I don’t think they did all that to feel morose and depressed. They could have stayed home and watched the news for that.

The biggest change during my “break” is the Do-Si-Do of dirty and politically correct. Back in my salad days (strangely when I ate hardly any salad), you couldn’t work dirty—or what we called “Blue.” Lenny Bruce got busted, tried and jailed for obscenity. Club managers would monitor your act and there were lines you couldn’t cross. But you could joke about race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality and a host of topics forbidden by today’s changed sensibilities. Sometimes those subjects also crossed the line—but not often by the standards of those days.

There is something good to be said about, if not orthodox political correctness, at least some sensitivity to issues of race, religion, and sexuality. I did some material 40 years ago that cause me acute embarrassment when I remember them. I think that our standards shouldn’t have to do with over sensitivity and being held hostage to the most sensitive in the room. I think the real issue is about power and the powerful and privileged mocking and putting down the less powerful. Comedy should be about punching up—attacking the icons not punching down and mocking the oppressed.

When I started in stand up, I borrowed the label from Mort Sahl of Iconoclast. Today, I’m afraid there are few, if any, icons worth “clasting” (casting down). Today many try to go for farce. (Farce is related to farcies, French for stuffing and derives from ancient Greek farces where the characters had exaggerated genitalia—pouches so over-stuffed as to make codpieces look understated.)

What’s the meta with us? Why do we waste so much of our precious time and spend so much of our political passion talking about talk and not our real problems? Why do we fight over which problem is the “real” problem and not engage the damn problems?

I’m heartsick that following the atrocity in Orlando the politicians and talking heads argue about what actually happened:

“It was terror attack. No, it was an Islamic terror attack. It was directed at us all. No, no. It was an act of homophobia. Alas no, it’s about guns and our inability to keep military grade weapons out of the hands of mad men. Ah, no, the real problem is the mad men. This is mental health issue.”

Any proposal to address any of these seemingly different subjects begets the angry response that it isn’t really about that; it’s about a different one. ENOUGH!

Orlando is about all of the above. Yes, it was terror directed at the United States in general and, in this instance, against the LGBTQ community. Yes it was rationalized as an act of Jihad–that’s why the perpetrator called to announce his affiliation with ISIS, having earlier claimed to be part of Hezbollah. Yes both ISIS and Hezbollah are ferociously anti-gay. This may explain the terrorist’s claim to be connected to both. So, yes again, his might have been an act of self-loathing that like many suicides by cop, sought a cover, a rationale, a meaning to his death. Yes, this means he had a mental health issue. And, being an American, of course he could get a hold of high-power guns with high capacity clips.

It’s also a problem that our intelligence people had the dots but even after two years couldn’t connect them. The FBI investigated him. They interviewed him at least twice and missed his web surfing of Jihadist sites and being friends with a suicide bomber. Also his two trips to our good ally Saudi Arabia didn’t count for much with our intelligence people. We don’t need more information or more dots. We need more human intelligence.

So yes, I understand that this is complicated but it is also interrelated. I understand that such complexity might make us freeze and do nothing. However, arguing about which factor or which failure should be our prime subject is an act of avoidance and a distraction.

TV commentators are arguing about Obama not using the term “Islamic violent extremism.” I believe he’s wrong not to use the term. The major acts of terror here and in Europe have been done by people who believed they were acting in the name of Islam–and who have been acknowledged by ISIS as acting in their name. For the president to say that he doesn’t want to libel all Muslims as terrorists is silly. In the same sentence he decried the violence of the Islamic State. Huh?

This is like saying that the Crusades were not done by Christians but “violent and deranged Knights Templar.” The Inquisition wasn’t perpetrated by Catholics but by some “overzealous Spaniards.” Most of us are sophisticated enough to understand that while the KKK and Aryan Brotherhood act in the name of Christianity, they don’t represent Christianity.

We are not at war with all of Islam but we are at war with the extremist Sunnis of ISIS and Al Qaeda, as well as the Shiite extremists of Hezbollah and the Al Mahdi Army.

Obama’s linguistic caution may be overzealous, but I do understand that we have a record of mixing up nationality and political loyalty. We didn’t distinguish very well our enemy Japan from our Japanese citizens and residents. We did persecute, but not imprison, some Italian and German “enemy aliens.” So there is some reason for caution. Yet I hate to spend precious time on a distraction–talking about how to talk.

There is no one thing we can do to make us totally safe. 911 wasn’t guns but box cutters. Still, our Founders never dreamed of AK47s and Uzis. We won’t solve all of our problems by trying to keep guns from dangerous people. Nor will mental health services and changes in the HIPPA laws alone make us safe. Remembering that only 15 years ago, homosexuality was listed as a medical psychiatric disease, we should be a little cautious in using the mental health model too easily. Certainly changing our words won’t protect us nor will banning or marginalizing Muslims be useful.

But everything we do to engage these issues is a step–a step beyond simply talking about how to talk. Our issues matter far too much to be rendered as merely meta.

The purpose of terror is to terrorize us. No, that is neither redundant nor tautological. It’s simply true. Terrorist’s kill for two main reasons. One is to give meaning to their deaths when there is no meaning to their lives. The other, and it’s related to the first, is to join a force of history, a struggle of good against evil. By killing, and often by dying, they create fear. They hurt our society, our sense of safety and inject the poison of hate and fear into the bodypolitic.

If their poison can change our society and change the course of an election, they win. We all know instinctively that if a mass terror event happens close to our presidential election it could change the result. We don’t know how or by how much, but we know. We know that if it’s one person, it will be perceived differently from a more widespread and organized attack. We know the number killed, and who is killed, will make a difference. But we cannot know that difference. Polling numbers are useless. We cannot accurately predict how we will feel following a mass event. We just know we will be touched.

The terrorist hate crime in Florida should touch each of us in our hearts, heads and guts. Here is a political crime, a hate crime and a religious crime. The killer’s and ISIS’s Homophobia leads to murder which leads to Islamophobia, which could lead to a distortion of our political process. Hate begets hate.

Yes, we’ll debate the madness of guns–but as always this will lead nowhere. The sad and tragic truth is that if we didn’t do anything about guns when our innocent children were slaughtered at Sandy Hook, we won’t do anything when most of the victims are Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual or Transgender.

If the framers of our Constitution saw “Negroes” as 3/5ths of a person, our society may see LGBT people as 4/5ths of a full person. Despite not yet being seen and felt as fully equal, the numbers of dead and injured seem to make up for any deficit of feelings for the victims.

This was perpetrated by a Muslim, a Muslim who apparently called 911 to confess his loyalty to ISIS and Abu-Bakr al Baghdadi. This was significant because in the terrorist’s eyes it made his death a part of a religiously sanctioned Jihad and thus guaranteed his admission into Paradise. You can’t simply proclaim your own Jihad. Even Osama Bin Laden looked to religious authorities to confirm his Jihad against America and the West.

Assured, then (to himself) that his probable immanent death would be a holy and redemptive sacrifice, he got his guns and waged his war against LGBT people and the “decadent west” that tolerates them. ISIS had specified that Gays should be killed. And, in Florida, a local Imam had preached that Gays needed killing for their own sake. This is the kind of terrible distortion that let the perpetrators of the Inquisition burn peoples’ bodies to save their souls. The perversion is not radical Islam’s alone.

An ISIS affiliate, looking for reflected glory, almost immediately took responsibility. For reason too perverse to comprehend, atrocities are markers of status in radical Jihad circles. However, mainstream Mosques and Muslim associations properly and appropriately repudiated this horror.

Our media are trying to distinguish between an ISIS attack and an ISIS “inspired” attack. This seems to be ISIS inspired and not an official operation. The line is a little blurry since ISIS has been criticizing American Muslims for not being Jihadists and pleading with Muslims here to run lone wolf and small group operations to inflict pain and damage on us.

Investigations will tell us about his connections to various violent extremists and organizations. Investigations may find threads that truly link this with other terrorist acts in the past and, I’m afraid, in the future. Investigations will certainly wonder why he was questioned twice by the FBI and let go. Our problem clearly is not a lack of intelligence or even connecting the dots but not knowing what to do with our great collection of dots.

Investigations may find that some of the victims died from “friendly fire” as the police stormed the nightclub. We will certainly question the time that went by between the 911 call and the storming. Some will hold the police waited too long and others that they didn’t wait and plan long enough. Whatever the second-guessing, the bad guy here is the terrorist. There are no perfect techniques for this kind of situation. None can guarantee a good outcome with a highly armed killer who is prepared to die.

There is no terror proofing our world. We cannot understand and predict terror by class or education. We cannot safeguard every potential target. Targets are infinite and as we “harden” one category of site, soft targets become attractive. Hence the market in Tel Aviv and the nightclub in Orlando.

What court can try Donald Trump? What judge or jury would be fit to judge him? Not an ethnically Mexican judge or jury. He wants, after all, to build a wall. Not a Muslim judge or jury. He wants to ban Muslims. Not a woman judge, not after all the antagonistic and misogynistic statements he’s made. They might prejudice women. If he can disqualify any jurist or juror by acting like a jerk, maybe he’s actually beyond the reach of law—having already gone well past the law of decency.

If Trump were to demand trial by “a jury of his peers,” we’d have to define his peer group. This might come down to arrogant, insecure and paranoid billionaires. Ok, there might be more than twelve in the nation. It could happen. However, the flaw is that what billionaire couldn’t and wouldn’t get out of jury service. Jury service is for “losers!”

There are absolutists for the 2nd Amendment and some for the 5th. But the most important Amendment may be the 25th. The sacred 25th describes how the Vice President and the majority of the Cabinet can suspend a sitting president from duties. If President Trump, er, I mean, any president, disputes the vote, it goes to Congress.

The fatal flaws in this protective amendment is that it only applies once the president is in office, and that it has to be confirmed by the president’s own cabinet.

We have no means of removing someone medically or mentally unfit for office before they reach that office. Well, we do have the vote, but the will of the people seems a more flawed idea every day.

Seriously, while psychologizing from a distance is both dangerous and common, it seems fairly clear that Trump is at least acting nuts. Now, I know the usual formulation is “I don’t dislike the person, only the policies,” but with Trump, I have no idea of his policies. He’s told us that he’s a negotiator and (he) “will do what it takes to close the deal.” He’s actually telling us not to believe him, even when he’s always saying, “This I can tell you. Believe me.” He embodies the classic Greek Paradox, “All Cretans always lie. I am a Cretan.” How meta.

Trump’s passionate position today, tomorrow becomes a mere suggestion or negotiating point. He wanted to ban all Muslims “till we get this thing figured out.” No, just some Muslims. No, it was “just a suggestion.” He wants to deport 11 million Mexicans, but he promises it will be “unbelievably humane.” He proposes “a deportation force” to unbelievably humanely round up brown people. Unbelievably, indeed.

Presidents sometimes are deep thinkers, sometimes not. We usually live through both kinds. But presidents cannot think out loud. Making your interior dialogue audible is not a good thing in any relationship, but as president it’s catastrophic. Someone might take you seriously, even if only by mistake. Musing that maybe Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia need their own nukes to defend themselves; and maybe we can write down our sovereign debt like Greece, or warn that there’s a housing bubble, well this mental meandering can cause wars to break out and markets to crash.

So, if I can’t rely on his positions to determine my support or opposition, what can I rely on? His success in business? His bankruptcies? His divorces? His smart daughter? His game-hunting sons?

Since I can’t see into his soul (assuming a fact not in evidence), I’m stuck with how he reveals his temperament—or, in his case—his temper. Accepting for the possibility that even his anger, pettiness, paranoia, and many manifestations of personal insecurity might be an act, a part of his performance, still, I’m stuck with the information I have.

Whether it’s reflex, emotional immediacy, intuitive political genius or just nuts, his lashing out at gays, Mexicans, women, Muslims and judges seem to me to be disqualifying. It’s not even if he believes what he says, it’s that he says what he says.

As a child,mythology was my first hobby. I was devoted in particular to Greek mythology. In my youth, it never occurred to me that a Greek God could be Black. However, when I saw Cassius Clay, he seemed to fit the bill. Maybe, as this week proves, he was only a mortal, more Discobolus, the Discus Thrower, than Apollo. Discobolus was cast first in bronze and then copied in white marble. Ali was a Greek statue carved in black marble, a statue come to life, speaking poetry and dancing. Imagine.

I saw him, as Cassius Clay, fight Sonny Liston on closed circuit at the Village Theater in Westwood. No one thought he could win–except me. And I’m not sure I really thought he could win, or just hoped that he would win. Of course, he won. Again on closed circuit, I saw him, this time as Mohammad Ali, fight Liston the second time–a satisfying result, if not much of a fight. Liston had no heart and was felled by a mystery punch. A dive? Probably not. More a surrender.

I saw Ali fight in person twice. First against Argentinian Alejandro Lavorante and then against the aging former champ, Archie Moore. Ali indeed “floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee.” He brought such grace to a violent and even cruel sport.

We all know he was famous. We also know he was controversial for marrying Black Power, as a member of the Nation of Islam, to anti-Vietnam War protests. We all know he was socially redeemed in this country and went from Presidents Johnson and Nixon’s enemies list to become a White House guest of Jimmy Carter and receive the Medal of Freedom from George W Bush. Ali proved that there are indeed second acts in American life.

His third act was the toughest. We saw him robbed of his skills, both physical and verbal, by a Parkinsonian Syndrome. This was the high cost of getting hit in the head and taking a punch–in fact many, too many, punches. But when people talked about banning boxing, he’d laugh, without bitterness, and say with heavy irony that many Black people got killed in the ghettos but if a few found a way to make millions that is what White people wanted to fix. He could be incisive.

As all heroes, Ali had feet of (appropriately) Clay. He could be mean. He punished Floyd Patterson by not knocking him out early but taunting him and showing him up because Patterson had refused to call him Mohammad. It seemed small of Ali at the time, but as I reflect, my judgment is tempered by understanding that Patterson’s refusal Ali felt not simply as an insult to him but to his religion.

I realized this when I lived in Tunisia in the mid 60s. Mohammad Ali was the most popular American in the country, the only American athlete my students knew. They loved him and could not understand American reluctance to recognize his conversion to Islam.

They liked that I called him Ali. They were thrilled that I’d seen him fight in person. It gave me special status. They thought I was very lucky. They were right. I was lucky to have seen him in his prime. He had something special. He was something special.